Making Americans: Hipsters, Tricksters and Geniuses

Undergraduate

A survey of American non-fiction narrative and other prose from the early republic to the rise of modernism. The course examines how autobiographies (Franklin, Douglass, Larcom, Thoreau, Stein) and other prose genres construct individual selves and national belonging while negotiating the pressures of transcendentalism, abolitionism, feminism, and class consciousness by means of aesthetic experimentation. Additional authors vary but often include Jefferson, Apess, Fuller, Hemingway, Adams, Hurston, Kerouac, and Agee.